I have to say I was still a little hungry after White Lies’ performance at Amoeba. They played a very short acoustic set on Tuesday night, and ended up with a cover of Prince’s ‘I Would Die For You’, which did not sound like a Prince song at all… Harry Mc Veigh’s deep vocals resonated in the large store and I was just getting into their music when he said ‘I guess that’s it’. It was an acoustic set, very stripped down at first, with just Mc Veigh’s voice and his guitar, then accompanied by a bit more, coming from an iPhone, some drum machine, a xylophone and a bass. The crowd around me got very enthusiastic, one guy did even rise one of his arms as if it was a very rock’ n’ roll moment when the song sounded quiet and intimate.
I had never heard them before, and at first, the charming English trio sounded like any traditional band of their native country, doing the acoustic thing with heartbreaks all over the lyrics ‘I’m gonna miss the way I missed you’,… ‘I have been lonely when I am with you/but now I am lonely all the same’, was singing Mc Veigh in ‘Change’, a new song of their new and third album ‘Big TV’ that they were promoting the same night. I could hear all the lyrics and wasn’t expecting more than this, but the following songs performed with more sophistication told me that their songs were probably more complex than this acoustic set was letting us suppose. Actually, they said several times they would be ‘trying’ to play this song or that song, meaning that it was close to impossible to play them acoustically. Effectively, when I listened to the recording of the first song they played, ‘First Time Caller’, it sounded a bit like the Pet Shop Boys or rather Depeche Mode meet the Killers, whereas live they sounded more like Okkervil River with an English accent, and a vague Interpol inflection, because of McVeigh’s beautiful dark croon.
But I should have mentioned first that these guys were young and super cute, that they spent four years non-stop working and touring, finally headlining a show at not other than London Wembley Arena in December 2011… So they are big in England, big in the dark post-punk tradition, with melodious songs and Mc Veigh’s voice that could easily navigate from highs to some Paul Banks deep and monotonous accents,… just listen to the start of ‘There goes our love again’. Bassist Charles Cave described their new album as ‘the band’s most melodic record’ which ‘follows the story of a couple who leave a provincial area for a big city and has the idea of equality in a relationship is a recurring theme’… In one word, they made a concept album in these streaming services era? How bold and old fashioned, but these young guys have strong ambitions, I just got that feeling looking at the cover of their album showing an astronaut head, entitled ‘Pilot 2’, coming from a series of space-exploration themed paintings by New York artist Michael Kagan. Moving to a big city and exploring space? With such driven themes, White Lies might just be ready to conquer the US.
